My word!

In all the talk about the way we talk around here, one thing that gets lost is how fast words can go out of fashion. And some never even leave the neighborhood.

Not too long ago, Boston teenagers had their own term for kissing. Two of them, in fact, and you could tell what side of the city someone was from based on the word he or she used. In Southie and Dorchester, the aggressive action verb "scoring" was used, as in "I scored Sully's sister up the park last night." In Hyde Park and West Roxbury and Roslindale, out with the two-toilet Irish in the bigger houses, the teens used the gentler term "scooping."

Boston has many shibboleths, linguistic peculiarities that separate us from the rest of the English-speaking world. (The term comes from a story in the Old Testament, where the pronunciation of the word shibboleth was used to distinguish Ephraimites from Gileadites; in the end, 42,000 Ephraimites were killed, betrayed by their accents). The most telling, of course, is the Boston accent, the one with the 25-letter alphabet. But there's more to our shibboleths than how we say words; what we say is the other side of this peculiar thing called "Boston English."

Jimmies. Regular coffee. Elastic. Bubbler. Tonic. Dungarees. Carriages. Gonzo. Packie. Parlor. Rotary. Bang a U-ey. Hosey. Wicked. There are hundreds of local terms. Some are going strong. Some have even gone national. Some aren't ours alone. And some are fading fast. Almost no one says "scoop" or "score" anymore. Boston teens have become like their counterparts around the country; they use the blanket term for youthful intimacy, "hook up."

So in the age of the mass media, with our national dialect becoming increasingly standardized, which of our local slang words are going to survive?

To gauge the status of Boston English, City Weekly polled the two camps that know the most about our language - the adults who study it, and the teenagers who dictate its evolution. Linguists say the terms that have the best chance of surviving are those that don't have an accepted term nationally, or that cover something that is relatively obscure.

"The media isn't telling you what to call 'jimmies,' " said John McCarthy, a linguistics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, referring to the local term for the rod-shaped chocolate bits used as an ice cream topping. "You don't see any advertising or discussion of jimmies, so people don't know that there is another word for it - 'sprinkles.' " (There are some who believe jimmies to be a racial slur - a play on the Jim Crow segregation laws - but McCarthy says it originated as a trademark name from a local company that made the chocolate topping, a contention that is supported by the Dictionary of American Regional English.)

What do you call the thing you push in the grocery store? "In Boston," McCarthy said, "that's called a 'carriage.' To the rest of the world, that's a grocery cart. But unless you've traveled, you don't know that there's anything else to call it because it's not the sort of thing they usually talk about on a television show."

At Boston Latin, the city's elite entrance-exam school that draws kids from all corners of "the Hub," an informal poll of nearly 200 students found that 61 percent still use the term jimmies, and 29 percent still say carriage. But some of the other iconic words are not so lucky.

Ever spill tonic on your dungarees? The kids at Latin don't. They spill soda on their jeans. Only 11 percent said they still used tonic - one of the more peculiar Bostonisms because it's the name for a completely different beverage - while just 7 percent still use dungarees as a term for denim jeans.

"Tonic is on its way out because of a migrating population and the pressure of the national media," said Michael J. Connolly, a linguistics professor at Boston College. "Terms like this are purely habit. And a lot of people who pick up these terms in their childhood will do their best to get rid of them because, as they move into college or other lives, they'll be made fun of."

Connolly says that words can be viewed as a piece of currency. If others don't recognize the word's value or meaning, then people stop using it. Once, in Boston, Connolly asked a man at a reception desk whether he had a rubber band. The man said, "I can tell you're not from Boston because we call it an elastic here." Connolly explained that he was a local (he's from Roslindale), but couldn't be sure the receptionist was, so he'd used the more nationally recognized word. John McCarthy has witnessed the other side of this dilemma, when his mother ordered a tonic on an airplane and, to her horror, received the stuff that's usually mixed with gin.

Eighty percent of the students at Boston Latin said they used the word "elastic" - the highest score for any word in the poll - but very few knew the term isn't recognized everywhere. (The Dictionary of American Regional English says it's also used in parts of the Midwest, California, and Utah; in Pittsburgh, they call it a gum band.)

Adam Gaffin, a New York native who came to Boston for college and stayed, was so amused by our odd words that in 1994 he created the Wicked Good Guide to Boston English, an Internet site that has become the dictionary-recognized caretaker of these words.

"My wife is from Illinois, and we were sitting around one day talking about all the different words people use around here, and we came up with 'bubbler' right away," Gaffin said, using the local term for a water fountain. He created the website, posted about 10 words, and asked people to submit their own.

There are now more than 200 entries covering the big icons and the more obscure slang often specific to particular parts of the region - like 'barnie.' That word popped up, to the confusion of many in the audience, in the movie "Good Will Hunting," which generally gets high marks for its use of Boston English. Casey Affleck - a Cambridge guy playing a Southie guy in the film - twice used the term "barnie," which according to the Wicked Good Guide, is a derogatory name in Cambridge for a Harvard student. Somervillians, meanwhile, use it to refer to anyone from Cambridge.

Even in Boston, and certainly beyond our borders, the words change meaning. For example, "scoring" long ago gained an entirely more serious meaning than kissing.

Though the mass media has taken away some of our terms, it has also spread some Bostonisms to the rest of the country.

Wicked has gone national, according to linguists, and so has a more obscure Boston word: gonzo.

The term was made popular by the Rolling Stone writer Hunter S. Thompson in the 1970s, after he adopted it as the moniker for his own brand of wacky reporting, and it has made its way into dictionaries, where it is usually defined as bizarre or crazy.

But the term came to Thompson from Southie, by way of a Globe reporter named Bill Cardoso. After reading one of Thompson's dispatches, Cardoso wrote him a letter calling his writing "pure gonzo." Cardoso later said he'd heard the term in Southie to describe the last man standing at the end of an all-night drinking binge. Five percent of the students at Boston Latin said they use the word; most are from Southie.

Language is a fickle thing. It's constantly evolving; it's very generational. While the Boston Latin School students said they recognized many of the 10 words in our survey because their parents or grandparents still used them, the students have moved on with their language.

But is there one word that will endure, a word that is so Boston as to be our one true shibboleth?

There are several candidates, but one stands above the rest.

It describes something obscure. It is ours and ours alone.

Most of the kids are still saying it. It has a Boston trick to its pronunciation.

And you can even have it with jimmies.

It's what you get when you blend ice cream, milk, and chocolate syrup. You should be able to take it from there.

Got a quintessentially Boston slang word not mentioned here? Send an e-mail about it and its meaning to ciweek@globe.com.